Anyone want a Virtualmin Virtual Appliance?

[dsoden]

Thanks, everyone for commenting and participating. I really intended this post to be about the Debian 10 / Virtualmin OVA Oracle VirtualBox template, then I made a grave mistake by muddying the waters by mentioning and “I also”, then brought up my UDEMY class thinking it was bonus information for folks who may need it, or who may be interested in it. I never realized in a million years that such an unassuming topical add-on would take over the main post and become “the” topic/debate of discussion.

Since I started this post, allow me to clarify my purpose for the course and why I made it.

• Educational - simply learning and understanding the process in a non-production setting
• Development, testing & collaboration with a potential customer (assuming you make websites)
• Proof of concept websites - why pay for hosting till you need to, or have financial constraints,
• Building a fantastic site in every way - means nothing without SEO, paid for traffic, or lots of work posting the site to social media to build awareness - this means a very low volume website at first and most new sites are lucky to get more than 25 visitors daily if they do nothing that I just mentioned, which covers a fair amount of them.

These are the reasons I had in mind when made the course, and no one is going to take the course unless they are already interested, or already contemplating these ideas I mention above. Sites that have graduated, have real and sustainable traffic are not going to want to host at home and will move along to a real and typical solution.

This is a functional educational and ASIDE topic share from my perspective, IMO I was not careless or reckless, and what I teach in the class is secure enough to be quite reasonable. Can it be locked down more? SURE, but that’s an entirely new course or topic. Going online period these days period is both a responsibility and a risk. 128-bit encryption is good and reasonable, 192-bit is better, and 256-bit still better. Anyone with half a brain knows that 128-bit encryption is going to be cracked before 256-bit. The point is locks keep honest people out, criminals and nefarious bad actors hell-bent on getting in your network and the site will eventually do so if they can. Do what you feel comfortable with, it’s your, decision, network, site, and home. Fear can be a good motivator, it can also be crippling - find a balance and take calculated risks. to each their own.

[Gomez_Adams]

Add to that:

The internet packages available for home use now in many cases meet or exceed the speed you’re going to be given by a great many hosts unless you’re buying a very high end package.

What’s more, your own server is going to be far more powerful than the shared server you’re going to be paying money to rent more times than not, unless, again, you’re paying for a high end service.

And like you say, for personal use, learning, development, what’s not to love? Worse case scenario you wipe it out and start over.

Nobody (with a reasonable mind, that is) thought you were discussing building Amazon on your home connection.

But what you’re aiming for is pretty much exactly what I’ve been doing for the last two years. Most of it I’ve learned through trial and error and here.